Walter Quakernack
Walter Konrad Quakernack (9 July 1907 – 11 October 1946) was a German Oberscharführer in the SS during the Nazi era. His SS membership number was 125266. He was tried for war crimes at the second Belsen Trial and executed. Quakernack is mentioned several times in the account of Filip Müller, who worked in a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz and was an eye witness.[1]
SS career
Quakernack was born in Bielefeld, Germany. He served as a secretary in the Politische Abteilung at Auschwitz concentration camp beginning in June 1940, where he participated in mass murders using the Genickschuss method of firing one bullet into the back of the neck, established by SS-Untersturmführer Maximilian Grabner.[2]
Quakernack worked as a team leader in the crematorium at Auschwitz and participated in the gassing of Soviet POWs at the end of 1941. In September 1942, he was promoted to Oberscharführer and awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz (War Merit Cross), in September 1943. He was further promoted camp commandant in April 1944 at Arbeitslager Laurahütte, a subcamp of Auschwitz in Siemianowice Śląskie.[3] He also worked at Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz.[4] During his time in Auschwitz, he was known to personally kill prisoners in the following way: the prisoners were led to a big warehouse, Quackernack would then also enter under the influence of alcohol with an MP-40 machine pistol and fire at the prisoners continuously to the moment when they were all dead. Former member of Sonderkommando unit, tasked to get the bodies on trucks and take them to crematorium recalled, that Quackernack was staying in the middle of the warehouse, surrounded by dead bodies, holding an overheated gun, with his uniform entirely red from blood laughing loudly. Quackernack notoriously abused alcohol, so he was barely walking and had numerous outbursts of anger.
On 23 January 1945 he accompanied a death march of 500 prisoners from Auschwitz to the Hanover-Mühlenberg concentration camp arriving around 3 February 1945. On 8 April 1945 he was part of a death-march evacuation from Mühlenberg to Bergen-Belsen.
Trial and execution
Quakernack was arrested by Allied forces and held at Celle and Lüneburg. He was sentenced to death at the second Belsen Trial in June 1946. He was hanged on 11 October 1946.[4]
References
- '^ Müller, Filip (1999) [1979]. Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers. trans. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. and Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee & in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. p. 180. ISBN 1-56663-271-4.
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(help) - ^ "The Auschwitz Extermination Camp" University of the West of England, Holocaust archive. Source: "German Crimes in Poland. Volume 1. Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. Warsaw, 1946" Retrieved May 17, 2010
- ^ "Laurahütte" Holocaust website. Retrieved May 17, 2010
- ^ a b Timeline of Quackernack's life Retrieved May 17, 2010